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Website Design, Elegance and Form – Lessons from WordPress

When Gutenberg was introduced on WordPress in 2017, users disliked it. Its block-based approach to content creation and editing was not elegant, but was gearing towards more design than substance, copying from lesser competitors like Wix.

Fast forward to Dec 2020, a year before the Classic Editor will be retired in end 2021, and most users still DISLIKE Gutenberg, for good reasons.

Some people like to nuance over design, microscopically adjust elements on a page ad nauseam, just to satisfy the fetish of having a design THEY like, rather than considering textual and useful content for USERS. Invariably, plenty of time is wasted, for little returns (in SEO, readability, and profits).

Conversely, the world of content has moved to Markdown, the elegant LESS-THAN-HTML text and multimedia formatting, which is not just for coders, but for content creators too. This is a divergence from the block-based Gutenberg and other design tools (remember Quark XPress and Adobe PageMaker LOL?).

Content is still BEST served by a “minimalist word-processing” approach, where textual content is king.